State Senate disregards concerns with 'guns in trunks' bill

Faster than a speeding bullet, the state Senate approved legislation last Monday that will make businesses and college campuses a lot less safe.

Sponsors of the notorious "guns in trunks" bill say that the opposite is true. The rest of us, who have memories, recall Virginia Tech, where 32 people were killed and 17 wounded by a gunman on April 16, 2007. Numerous workplace shootings occurred nationwide over the past 30 years, too, because people who are busy at their jobs can easily be caught unaware by an aggrieved co-worker.

It is precisely why employers prohibit firearms in the workplace.

For college campuses, the dangers are even more complicated. Students live in close quarters on campuses - when they are not in the classroom - a setting in which they are unlikely to see a shooter approaching.

Bill sponsors continue to paint a picture of ordinary folks who need to pack heat everywhere they go - to campus, to work, to the store, presumably to church.

The rationale for "guns in trunks" at work and on campus is deeply flawed, and a person has only to look at how senators rushed the bill through without time for reasoned discussion with business leaders and law enforcement officials. The bill's sponsors also have signaled that they want to pre-empt federal legislation that could follow in the wake of the Newtown tragedy.

Bill sponsors seem to believe that some language added to the legislation to protect employers from lawsuits if there is a shooting or theft will silence business owners. But perhaps employers are more worried about what could happen to their employees than about themselves.

We have to remember that the only employees Tennessee lawmakers are personally responsible for already are safe in their workplace - guns are prohibited in the state Capitol and Legislative Plaza.

Meanwhile, the nameless, faceless (to them) workers throughout Tennessee are fine to experiment on with radical legislation.

How disgusted would the Founding Fathers - who are so often and shamelessly invoked by the NRA's leadership and legislators such as these - be to witness laws being drawn up just to drive sales and manufacture of weapons?

Nearly 400,000 Tennesseans hold handgun-carry permits. Obviously, the vast majority of them, just like the vast majority of the overall population, will do the right thing. We are worried that measures such as "guns in trunks" will enable the relatively few, who will act in anger over a perceived wrong, to use deadly force.

This legislation is dangerous, and House Speaker Beth Harwell and other representatives still have a chance to stop it.

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State Senate disregards concerns with 'guns in trunks' bill

Faster than a speeding bullet, the state Senate approved legislation last Monday that will make businesses and college campuses a lot less safe.